Good bird, bad bird

 

Can I paint a better than usual picture and fuck up badly the next one? Sure! This happens often and it's probably because I'm studying art formally after many years of undisciplined drawing. I know what I need/want to do, but bad habits, haste and small "superstitions" always try to take over, and sometimes they succeed. Well... onto the next ones.

Cross pollination

I keep noticing that training certain skills improves other apparently unrelated skills. I haven't done much exercise to develop smoother line drawing, but after about two years of animal studies I'm becoming much more confident with lines too.

Geese, ducks, swans (from life)

Cougar (from photos)

I guess that's because most animals don't stand still, so you have to become very fast to draw them live and improvise a lot. This has forced me to rely on less pen strokes to draw the outline. As a result now I appreciate line drawings a lot more. I prefer to sketch animals using more lines to give them a fuzzier feeling but now I alternate the ballpoint pen with thin markers.

It feels funny to realize how much I had missed before, now even my random sketches have much more variety than they did a few years ago. Here's a few bunnies and fish drawn from the mind during a train trip.